The Walking Dead – About The Living

Recently I started watching “The Walking Dead“. Several friends had recommended it and I admit that I avoided it for a while because, honestly I saw no way that a zombie television series could really captivate anyone for any length of time. Yes, I’ve read the comics and I enjoyed them, but again, zombies… Really?

So there I sat in my living room, having finished Continuum on Netflix and of course Netflix feels that it can recommend a show to you, which half the time I roll my eyes and search for something else. However, for some reason, this time I hit ‘Play’.

I am now on season 2 and although the gore is something I could without (yes, I know… I’m a thriller writer that writes about keeping heads alive, yet I complain about gore). Writing about gore and watching it are two different things – sometimes. Anyway, back to the show; The Walking Dead is surprisingly very well written and the character development completely took me by surprise. I will admit, there are of course some predictable parts at times, but there are also elements that completely took my by surprise.

My heart was wrenched when Carl was shot and I literally said out loud while I was watching “If they kill him, I swear I will stop watching this show.” It wasn’t that he got shot that hit me so hard, it was the moment in which he got shot. A moment of complete, childhood peace, between him and the deer. Something that I have seen in my own children and have experienced myself.

Obviously I got through that part. The show twists and turns as much as The Steel Van Man, which is exactly what makes it so attractive. The actors (ironically – mostly British) are phenomenal and truly put their heart into the characters. Executive producer and writer Robert Kirkman‘s genius in the creation of the story line and further working with writers Scott Gimple, and Glen Mazzara (who wrote on The Shield) really add quality resonance to the show.

A friend of mine saw a snip-it on my phone while I was watching and commented “Really? Is that what you want to watch? Evil? Death, gore?” At first I was offended as I really like the show a lot, but after further thinking about her comments, I can completely see her perspective and that is almost exactly the reason I chose not to watch it for so long. However, having seen as much as I have – I’ve come to realize that the show isn’t really about the gore, about the dead… It’s about the living. It’s about the struggle, the journey. It’s about what is left behind and how we as humanity prevail, survive and show that despite such atrocities and horror, the human soul can prevail. That love, friendship and loyalty are the strongest and most important parts of our existence.

It’s hard for us to see that in our daily life, going about hum drum jobs, our family routines. It takes extremes, war, famine, plague, struggles to really bring out what makes us human at the core – and what shows the worst of humanity. There is most definitely evil out there in our world, but there is tremendous good in the world as well. As cliche as it sounds, you can’t have one without the other. Otherwise you would never know the good when you saw it.